Une Envie de Sel

The weather this spring has been wild and woolly, real Colorado weather, I guess you'd say. But I haven't seen spring storms this extreme since my first year or two in Colorado, some 17 or 18 years ago. I remember driving from Boulder (where I was staying with friends) to Vail (where I would soon take up residence) during a particularly tempestuous spring storm, which brought blackout rain so dense I could barely see the road, and - just about the time I reached the old mining town of Silver Plume - golf ball-sized hail which finally drove me off the road. Colorado weather is famously mercurial, and if you wait fifteen or twenty minutes, pretty much anything will pass. It wasn't long before I was back on the road. One very quickly grows used to such driving conditions in Colorado.
The past week has been particularly moody, and we have seen storms like those I remember - storms that bring rocks down from the mountainside and set off fire alarms in the parking lots and set the power flickering in neighborhood houses. Storms that blacken the sky and tug tiny, fierce twisters from the clouds over the farm country to the northeast. Storms that can flood an intersection in the city as quickly as a flashflood in a desert canyon, and even carry off an adult human being (as sometimes happens in the canal-style waterways that intersect the city).
Though it disrupts my running habits, I don't mind the wet weather - we have precious little of it here on the verge of the plains. It makes our gardens happy, and bolsters them a bit against the hot, dry summer to come. Don't get me wrong - we're not good gardeners. We are hap-hazard gardeners, at best. But hundreds of years of buffalo herds, followed by decades of cattle farming, have made our neighborhood rich in fertilized earth, and it's easy to grow things here. Our gardens grow, I think it's safe to say, more in spite of us than because of our very spotty skill.
On top of that, I discovered (the first time we were caught in a raging deluge while trying to head out for a run) that my fearless daughter literally laughs in the face of even the most furious lightening storm. Each time the thunder clapped, and each time the lightening struck closer to our hideout, she laughed louder, until she was shrieking and gurgling and choking with hilarity, furiously signing "rain" the whole time (she's very, very good at sign language). It's difficult to resent the bad weather with such a game companion at your side.